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Topic: Communism Creates Conservatives (Read 483 times)

If you ever have 15 minutes to burn, please, I implore you to read this article to your kids.

Pinkerton: How Cultural Revolution and the Legacy of Communism Turned Europe’s Left into the Right

Snipped two-thirds of the way through.This is a must read for those that think Europe is free.

In Europe, the hulking embodiment of this slow-rolling cultural revolution is the European Union. The EU is decidedly not communist, in the sense that private ownership is the norm, even if, of course, the public sector also looms large. And of course, it has free elections, and no actual Gulags.

Still, the EU is notorious for its worsening “democracy deficit”—that is, the ability of the reigning bureaucrats in Brussels to ignore public opinion as they work their will.

To the Eurocrats, this anti-democratic power is a feature, not a bug. After all, the EU’s avowed mission is the erosion of nationalism and national sovereignty in favor of the mantric goal of “Deeper European Integration”—a borderless continent. Such borderlessness, of course, provides exactly the sort of oceanic market that that a company such as Google so fervently desires.

So we can see: The EU is a hybrid mix of bureaucracy, corporate power, and progressive ideology, all helixed together, working against the interests of a conservative nation-state such as Poland. And so don’t hold your breath for the EU to come rushing to Poland’s defense in the matter of that un-PC “Goolag” video.

Thus we can behold the full dimensions of the East-West split: The nationalist East and the post-nationalist West.

Without a doubt, the post-nationalist path is favored by many in the West—and nowhere more than Germany.

However, EU-style post-nationalism is deeply threatening to the ex-communist countries that remember that it was their nationalist spirit—most notably, Poland’s Solidarność movement in the early ’80s—that helped deliver them from the grip of communism. So to Eastern European ears today, the EU’s odes to internationalism—including international corporatism—sound a bit like lines from The Internationale, the old communist marching song.